"Finding junk and talking bollocks." That’s how Lance (Toby Jones) describes the life he and his best mate Andy (Mackenzie Crook) live in Detectorists, the gentle and beloved BBC sitcom that began 10 years ago this month.
David Renshaw had a nice piece on Detectorists in the Guardian earlier this week, though calling the series 'gentle' downplays its ability to embrace the mystical and the sinister.
Mackenzie Crook, the writer of the series, came up with a better word:
"I deliberately set out to write something uncynical and removed from the awkward 'cringe comedy' that was prevalent at the time," Crook ... says, as he reflects on the show.
He points to the series being made cheaply and airing on BBC Four, a channel made for obsessives precisely like Lance and Andy, as being key to the show’s slow-burn success. "Those who found it felt they’d discovered something special."
And he shared insight into the the genesis of one of the recurring themes of the show:
His introduction to the world was through an episode of Time Team in which a pair of detectorists claimed they had found Viking artefacts in a field in Yorkshire.
The often difficult relationship between the amateur detectorists and TV archaeologists, perhaps mirrored in Detectorists through the villainous Simon & Garfunkel characters, struck him as a rich source of comedy and pathos.
"There was something suspicious about these guys and the feeling was that they weren’t telling the whole truth," he says.
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